How four women defied the Nazis – from within a concentration camp

Telegraph

13-07-2025

The 80 th anniversary of the Second World War continues to produce its avalanche of books, many of them increasingly angle-hungry to avoid repeating so much of what we know already. American historian Lynne Olson's angle in The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück is not merely the woman's view, as must be expected about a Nazi concentration camp designed specifically for them, but one that loses no opportunity to give French men a kicking. Her thesis, which we should be far from ready to accept, is that the story of the French resistance has long been presented as a basically masculine enterprise in which the women broadly had a support role.
It is not true that the resistance (in all its forms: Olson is quite right to state that it was hardly a unified organisation) operated like that. But nor is it true that that is how history has presented it, as many of the secondary sources (on which this book is perhaps too heavily reliant) have for decades made clear. If people want to believe that women have been written out of the script then that is up to them, and it would suggest they have not read much of the existing literature. Still, every new book on the heavily-exploited subject of Hitler 's war needs a unique selling point, and that appears to be Olson's.
To her credit, she has read a lot of other people's work on the subject, though it does not prevent her from making the odd slip. When I last went there Niort was a town in the west of France, not one in the north-east; and her statement that 'more than a million Allied soldiers rounded up during May and June 1940 [on the Western Front, around the Fall of France] were scheduled to be shipped to Germany to do slave labor' [sic] is just bizarre.
As she points out later in the book, Germany was selective about in which camps it observed the Geneva Convention; but captured Allied soldiers at that time did not normally face the fate of ending up in a situation where the Convention was not observed. The endnotes offer no indication of where her slave labour idea came from. Indeed, many of the French who were captured were sent back to France as civilians after the armistice signed by Pétain, even if they ended up as forced labourers after the crumbling Nazi war economy started conscripting French people as workers once Vichy was occupied in 1942.
The author focuses on various women who were genuinely heroic and, for their resistance activities, ended up in Ravensbrück. The camp was opened shortly after the start of hostilities to house female political prisoners and others who had offended the master race in some way. The camp was north of Berlin and in what, immediately after the war, would become the Soviet zone of occupation. It was not, until very near the end of the war, an extermination camp: it became one when Hitler, in his increasing psychopathy and madness, decided that none of the prisoners of the Reich should survive.
However, conditions in the overcrowded camp, with its regime of forced labour, were almost non-existent and foul food and random sadism ensured that many women did die. A crematorium was provided for convenience as a result. The heroines of Olson's book – Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the General, Germaine Tillion, an eminent anthropologist, Jacqueline d'Alincourt, a young French aristocrat, and Anise Girard, who while still a teenager was recruited into an anti-Nazi intelligence network – all survived.
They have provided testimonies to numerous historians of the camp on which Olson has drawn, having all died long before she wrote her book. The last survivor was Girard, who at 93 was present at the interment of Tillion and de Gaulle in the Panthéon in Paris: for all the talk about the female contribution to the resistance being overlooked, these two women were done the honour their heroism merited.
The fact that they survived was rather as though they were winners of some sort of diabolic lottery. Tillion's mother, Émilie, was also rounded up and, having survived until the final acts of psychopathic madness in the last phase of the war, went to the gas chamber. This was largely because of her age (she was in her late 60s), and despite efforts by the other women to hide her and disguise the physical manifestations of ageing through makeup and through having her wear a scarf to conceal her greying hair at roll-call. An inmate working in the camp's records department – the Nazis were very meticulous at keeping records of their victims – forged her age on her file, but it was all to no avail.
Her daughter and her three friends were spared the cull for various reasons. In most cases it was their relative youth, and that they could, despite malnutrition and disease, still perform the various acts of slave labour their captors imposed on them – not to mention the routine beatings. Camaraderie not just among the French women, but among all the inmates of whatever nationality, was intensified by the hatred of their oppressors. Small acts of kindness assumed gigantic proportions in such a scene of horror. The camp ended up containing around four times as many women as it was intended to house: inevitably many died of disease, saving the Nazis the trouble of slaughtering them.
After a long period in a hellish solitary confinement, de Gaulle was first moved to a less spartan part of the camp and then, after the liberation of France, released. Himmler, as the head of the SS, had seen her as a potential hostage because of her relationship to her uncle, but eventually saw the benefit of exchanging her in a prisoner swap to boost his own credentials with the people he realised were going to win the war, and save his own neck. His suicide rendered that pointless, and Hitler profoundly disagreed with his idea of a negotiated peace.
As the camp authorities proceeded to murder as many as they could, lives were eventually saved by the Swede Count Bernadotte who, anxious to improve neutral Sweden's post-war reputation in the light of its having been considered rather too friendly to the Nazis, negotiated the rescue of the camp's remaining inmates and their repatriation to their own countries. A number went straight back to France; some had a period of recuperation in Sweden first.
The camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, escaped and was found in 1949 working as a waiter in Munich. Although Olson is highly critical of the use of the British common law system, saying it was inadequate for the seven trials of Ravensbrück war criminals, Suhren got what was coming to him, and was shot by a French firing squad in 1950.
Olson spends too long on the after-story of the inmates, the book becoming tedious in its later stages with a rather dull episode about an American woman's making of a documentary on the camp. Readers will be glad to hear of the fulfilling family lives that the women lived after their nightmare, and that many of those who tormented them received justice; but much else in the last part of the book is irrelevant. Also, the book is a struggle to read. It is written in American and the publisher has not thought it worth the investment of translating it into English. Olson's style is at times cloying and always adjective-rich, which makes the reader feel he or she is trapped in an interminable, over-written article in a women's magazine. The story of Ravensbrück, and of the role of French women in resisting Nazi occupation, is important: but it has already been told, and much better than this.
★★★☆☆